Flaubert-isons

How do I really spend my time? You think I’d know, since I plan every variable (exercise, sleep, work hours, pages to read) like a madwoman. But I haven’t really thought about how it all shakes out into percentages. Last week sometime (in a post I can’t find now) I read someone’s goal for the new year was to keep the work/fun balance by trying for 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work, 8 hours leisure.

Sounds nice, right? I had no idea if I was anywhere close to that. And then this morning I saw this post from Colossal about famous creatives and how they spent each day. Of course I dropped everything to crack open an Excel sheet and color-code my own day. I didn’t have to even tell you that.

Verdict? Using the categories from the Colossal infographic, my day looks like this:

My design skills are out of this world. I know.

On an average day, I spend 8 hours sleeping, 7 hours at my day job, 3.5 in “other” (which basically means driving kids somewhere, cleaning, or cooking a meal), 3 hours on food/leisure, 1.5 on creative work, and 1 on exercise.

If I’m sick (like this week) or have too much review work to do, I skip the gym and end up doing creative work from 4:30-6:00 AM, too.

So?

It reveals both my propensity for charting things and the fact that I do not have nearly enough hours in my day. It also reveals what I fundamentally feel, which is that I wish I had more yellow (leisure) and pink (creative) on my chart. I’ll be glad when I can scale back the green (day job) to do this. But I feel so pleased about my sleep habits. No single other thing I’ve done in the last year has made me more happy. Everything is easier with more sleep, harder with less. Kind of cool to lay it all out so I can compare it to, you know, Flaubert.

Hey, and [shameless plug!] speaking of making comparisons to authors, I have a piece up at Ploughshares today where I do just that. Here’s an excerpt:

I love art from other art. Ballets inspired by narratives. Garments influenced by architecture. Paintings that translate sound into color. Recognizable connections light up our synapses. We like things that remind us of other things, particularly if the connections are clever. (How else do you explain the popularity of “Weird Al” Yankovic?) Inspired work honors its source, but often it also begins a conversation. Many of the best literary examples don’t just use an original plot for a model, but reanimate the language of the older work to create something new. When an author uses work this way, the tension between two texts adds gravity to them both.